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Tuesday, 22 March 2005

Cory Bergman writes: "This is one of the brightest ideas I've seen in awhile. OurMedia allows anyone to upload digital media they've produced -- video, audio, animations, photos -- to share with the public for free. Some of the best stuff is highlighted, and the site ranks the most popular submissions. ..." Link: Lost Remote. OurMedia is a project of J. D. Lasica and partners. As of 3/22, there's a good chance you won't be able to access the site due to overload. --Dennis

In-Stat has a downloadable white paper on WiMax. Abstract: "Just because WiMAX has been the center of a lot of attention
lately does not mean that it is all hype and no substance. In fact, quite the
opposite is true. Currently, there is a large number of companies actively
promoting WiMAX, with nearly 200 in its forum. It also has opportunities before
it to not only be a potentially cheaper way of providing broadband – both in the
US and abroad – but it also can be used as a means to provide backhaul for
cellular BTSs, as well as, eventually, providing an alternative to the high cost
of using a mobile phone. ..." Link: In-Stat. Free registration required. --Dennis

Over the last year, users in mature Internet markets such as the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and the U.K. have shown minimal to flat growth in terms of average time spent online at home, according to a report by Nielsen//NetRatings. ...¶... The U.S. showed zero growth in average monthly sessions, ranking next-to-last in the study's year-over-year analysis. ... Link: ClickZ Network.

Robert Kaye writes: "... Lastly I wanted to mention that the BBC had a very strong presence at ETech -- there were a number of presentations that made it clear that the BBC is thinking about and starting to apply emerging technologies at the BBC. Personally, I thought that old guard media companies like the BBC are dinosaurs that are waiting for extinction -- that is certainly the case here in the US. But it's increasingly clear that the BBC is keenly aware of its predicament and is working hard to make changes to preserve their relevancy. ..." Link: O'Reilly Developer Weblogs. Thanks to Stephen Hill for the tip. -- Dennis

Monday, 21 March 2005

The ultrahigh definition video system has 16 times the resolution of HDTV and more than twice the resolution of 70mm motion film,... The ultrahigh-definition video system is called "Super Hi-Vision." ¶ NHK has also developed a 22.2 multichannel sound system for use with ultrahigh-definition video. ... Link [pdf]: NAB TV TechCheck. Got speakers? --Dennis

Adam Thierer writes: "The radio industry is commonly cited by many media critics as a poster
child for the supposed evils of media consolidation. While it is true
that a large number of acquisitions took place in the radio market
following relaxation of the radio ownership rules back in 1996, the
reality is that the radio marketplace—properly defined—is very competitive and nowhere near being the “monopoly” that some critics claim. ..."

And also:Red Lion R.I.P.: FCC Declares the Scarcity Doctrine Dead. "'[T]he Scarcity Rationale for regulating traditional broadcasting is
no longer valid.' So begins a stunning new white paper from the Federal
Communications Commission. In the paper, 'The Scarcity Rationale for Regulating Traditional Broadcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed,' author John Beresford, an attorney with the FCC’s
Media Bureau, lays out a devistating case against the Scarcity
Rationale, which has governed spectrum & broadcast regulation in
the United States for over seven decades. ¶ Calling the Scarcity Rationale 'outmoded' and 'based on fundamental
misunderstandings of physics and economics,' Beresford goes on to show
why just about everything the FCC every justified on this basis was misguided and unjust. ..." Link for both articles: The Technology Liberation Front weblog. NB: Can't find a permalink, so if you're reading this well after the posting date, it may have moved. --Dennis

In a follow-up on Wired's recent cover package, Chris Anderson writes: "This
week has brought more evidence that radio is an industry in the midst
of disruptive transformation. The big news was that Viacom is planning to split off its broadcasting side,
including the troubled Infinity radio division. But there were many
smaller signals as well that radio as we know it is about to change. ..." Link: The Long Tail weblog. Important for readers with radio ties. --Dennis

Chris Anderson writes: "I've been planning to start a Long Tail FAQ, beginning with a question
I get all the time: 'I can see what the Long Tail offers consumers
and distributors, but are there equal advantages for producers?' The
answer to that will be at least one chapter of the book, so it's a lot
for a FAQ. But the short form is 'Yes'. The supply side of the Long
Tail is a rich topic that neatly compliments the demand-side focus of
most of my writing to date. ..." Link: The Long Tail weblog.

Sunday, 20 March 2005

For the past several months, I've been using Google Alerts, customized daily emails to alert me when something of interest for my web log pops up in Google News. For example, I have one that sends me a digest of daily references to "HD Radio." I've had a couple of dozen of these and, while they've been a useful supplement to my now 190 RSS feed subscriptions, the ratio of possible links to usable stuff has been too high. A couple of weeks back, I subscribed to del.icio.us RSS feeds for the tags, "podcasting" and "broadcasting." With these, I'm finding many more usable links and I've been impressed enough that this weekend I've replaced 15 of the Google Alerts with del.icio.us feeds.

If you're not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a bookmark manager. Instead of using your browser's favorites page to enter your bookmarks, you can do it on del.icio.us and add descriptive tags ("radio," "DRM," etc.). Not only can you see all your own tags, you can also see what other people have saved using the same tags. And, using the magic of RSS, you can subscribe to those tags in your news aggregator (I mainly use Bloglines) so any time someone adds a bookmark using a tag in which you're interested, it registers as something new in your aggregator account. Very powerful.

So why is this important for digital media?

Google and other search engines give you everything that matches a search term -- kind of like drinking out of a firehose. On the other hand, del.icio.us tells you what other people think is important enough to bookmark -- that is, to what they are paying attention. Since the end of January, the Public Service Publisher initiative, in which I'm active, has had the benefit of the vision of Steve Gillmor, the co-proposer of the attention.xml specification, a means of harvesting metadata about actual usage to enable people to be smarter about what things they pay attention to. The tags used by del.icio.us and the photo site Flickr.com perform a similar function, though in a manual way.

Search will be important for future digital media sites, but with thousands of content elements, attention will be even more powerful.

Wired editor-in-chief and father of the Long Tail meme, Chris Anderson, writes: "... This morning [3/17] I spoke on the economics of
the Long Tail, a subject I've been noodling around a bit here. Your comments
were incredibly helpful in steering the presentation, which you can download here.
(Note: it's a largish [ppt] file--6.9MB--and is best viewed in presentation mode, so
the animations show up in the right order.) ..." The Long Tail weblog.